January 20, 2015

“In terms of mental health, it was a desert here at the time. If anyone in Bnei Brak had a problem – and recognized it – they would travel as far away as they could [for treatment] so as not to be seen,” says the 50-year-old Bunzel. “To open up [a clinic] here was to go up straight in the face of the stigma. People predicted no one would show up.”

January 19, 2015

Haredi classified ad for two Internet mashgiachs - men paid to sit in a person's office to help make sure that person does not use his Internet access for pornography or other forbidden things like blogs.

“Uri and I were born in the same year, the same day and the same hour. We always maintained a friendship despite differences. This is true today too, [even] after we both entered politics. We do not believe in mysticism but who knows, perhaps there is something. It compels me to think that there is significance. At times, he takes the words out of my mouth. I may be non-religious, but [I] join the calls to pray on his behalf."

There has been much discussion in the media over the past week since the Oscar nominations were made public about Hollywood's alleged racism. Most of it focused on the fact that that the film Selma, about the historic 1965 civil rights march led by Reverend Martin Luther King, Junior – whose birthday we celebrate today as a national holiday – was nominated but its African-America director, Ava DuVernay, was not. But the biggest slight was done to history and truth by DuVernay, who smears President Lyndon Johnson in the film and completely removes King's Jewish allies.

NYPD officers (posthumously promoted to detectives) Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu were assassinated last month near the corner of Tompkins Avenue and Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn. The block of Tomkins Avenue where the officers were murdered has now been renamed "Fallen Officers Way" without permission of the city by cops using official police equipment to post the signs.

"This is the first time a multi-purpose bone tool from this period has been discovered. It proves that Neanderthals were able to understand the mechanical properties of bone and knew how to use it to make tools, abilities usually attributed to our species, Homo sapiens."

January 18, 2015

The shigella bacterium outbreak that started in Williamsburg and Borough Park, Brooklyn has now spead to Monsey, Spring Valley and other Rockland County haredi communities. There are at least 80 known cases in Brooklyn and at least another 66 in Rockland County – almost all little haredi children.

The Dvar Yom B'Yomo hasidic newspaper published an that wants men to know that a man pushing a baby stroller in public as his wife walks nearby is goyish behavior [non-Jewish behavior]. It cites a Satmar rabbi as its source.

A hasidic coloring sheet on a Torah portion claims "all the [wild] animals came to Egypt, and they devoured the Egyptians. Even from the houses the animals schlepped out the Egyptians and devoured them." Watching in peace as the animals kill the Egyptians are hasidic children.

January 17, 2015

Dozens of Jews and Muslims gathered outside the Grand Synagogue in Tunis, Tunisia Saturday night in a candlelight vigil in memory of 21-year-old Yoav Hattab, a son of the chief rabbi of Tunisia Benjamin Hattab, who was murdered in the terror attack on the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket in Paris a week ago.

A haredi modesty campaign promoted through ads placed on Egged buses in Jerusalem is drawing questions and disapproval from many Jerusalem residents who wonder why Egged has so often refused to run ads by liberal groups or ads featuring pictures of drawings of females, but then willingly chose to run this haredi modesty campaign.

January 16, 2015

63-year-old Rabbi Ben-Tzion Welton, the founder and CEO of Vaad Hakashrus of Northern California (a small regional kosher certification agency), reportedly began experiencing extreme nausea this summer. His digestive system eventually stopped functioning properly. Welton recently was hospitalized for a week and is now dependent on a form of intravenous nutrition. He is unable to work and has lost 30 pounts since October.

A new lawsuit claims Lakewood haredi Rabbi Eliezer Perr and his son Rabbi Jedidiah Perr have looted an organization, the American Center for Civil Justice, meant get Iranian and Syrian assets for American victims – including US soldiers – of terror attacks linked to those governments. Much of the looted money was allegedly given to haredi yeshivas run by the Perr family or haredi yeshivas are students in or alumni of. And among those crying foul is Michael Engelberg, an Orthodox pediatrician who cofounded the American Center for Civil Justice and who was once a student of Rabbi Eliezer Perr at Ner Israel Yeshiva in Baltimore.

Temperatures dropped to around zero degrees Celsius, and last week many of the approximately 2,300 African asylum seekers detained in Holot complained that the Israel Prison Service (IPS) had confiscated their personal space heaters. All of the rooms in Holot are unheated and uninsulated, except for a public dining room, a public lounge – and all of the rooms used soley by Israel's prison guards.

The haredi-controlled government of the City of Beit Shemesh has reportedly decided to move 150 secular children out of the Safot Vetarbuyot (Languages and Cultures) school in the Ramat Beit Shemesh neighborhood and put haredi girls in the school building in their place.

The official state rabbinical court in Jerusalem that ordered a woman it labeled a get (Jewish religious divorce) refuser arrested and jailed earlier this week acted even more egregiously than originally reported – and it is completely unrepentant.

Many of Agudath Israel's top rabbis banned the Internet, smartphones and home computers (some allow these but only for very restricted use by adults who have pressing business needs, and only when haredi-rabbi-approved modesty filers are installed). But now for the first time a division of Agudath Israel of America has its own official website.

January 15, 2015

This would have been completely foreign to haredim living 50 years ago let alone 150 years ago, but a fish shop in the haredi Mea Shearim neighborhood of Jerusalem now has gender-separate entrances and counters (and, apparently, hours, as well).

“The eight-year-old can’t see what I don’t want him to see. True, a picture of Angela Merkel should not ruin the child, but if I draw a line, I have to put it there from the bottom all the way to the top.…Including a picture of a woman into something so sacred, as far as we are concerned, it can desecrate the memory of the martyrs and not the other way around.”

A haredi woman who had just been released from a hospital following surgery was arrested by police Tuesday and then chained to a hospital bed for refusing to accept a get (Jewish religious divorce) from her husband, even though the husband was in violation of longstanding family court rulings.

Yiscah Smith used to be Rabbi Yaakov Smith, the Chabad shaliach (emissary) in Jerusalem's Old City Jewish Quarter from 1985 through 1991. He then taught at Aish HaTorah for a brief time. And now, years later he is a she, and she is teaching and writing elsewhere in the city. And she davens in the women's section of the Kotel (Western Wall) – something that will likely enrage haredim.

Legal papers were served to two members of the haredi-controlled scandal-plagued East Ramapo school board during Tuesday's meeting. The papers are part of the new petition to block the sale of Hillcrest Elementary school to a Skvere girls school, Avir Yaakov – the same school that allegedly bribed the appraiser in the earlier sale fo the property to Avir Yaakov. That first below market rate sale was voided by the state and the new petition asks the state to annul this new, second sale. Watch as the district's high-priced and notoriously combative attorney, Albert D'Agostino, picks up the papers and throws them in the trash with a flourish.

On a recent trip to B&H, the salespeople — designated by their green vests — appear near evenly split between observant Jews and non-Jews. Nearly all are male and only two women are seen in green vests during 45 minutes wandering the store. The few blue-vested managers spotted are grey-haired, Orthodox men. Cashiers and greeters wear red vests. Every red vest is worn by a woman.

Brooklyn DA Ken Thompson won't release a report that will likely show one of two things: his star prosecutor broke the law and convicted an innocent man to keep her perfect record of murder convictions intact or that the report itself is deeply flawed.

“Not only is the mall crawling with Arabs luring poor daughters of Israel into their nets, not ceasing by day or night, but the entire main street of Kiryat Haim, Ya’alon’s birthplace, is full of decorated spruce trees. Cafes and restaurants, including those sanctioned by the rabbinate, are adorned with decorations marking their holiday denoting the first of January. Not one person raised a voice in protest!"

Shigella, an infection that strikes the digestive tract, is near-epidemic in hasidic Williamsburg and Borough Park. Symptoms of the illness include severe diarrhea, stomach cramps and fever. Very severe shigella infections can cause convulsions and kidney failure. The infection appears to be spread mostly from student to student in crowded hasidic schools.

January 14, 2015

Rabbi Martin "Mordechai" Wolmark, 56, pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Freda L. Wolfson in Trenton federal court to an information charging him with conspiracy to travel in interstate commerce to commit extortion as part of the Rabbi Mendel Epstein ring.

At least two of the four families didn't want to bury their loved ones in Israel, but the Netanyahu government allegedly pressured them into doing so anyway and then allowed an Israeli burial society to charge them almost $13,000 each for a plot and the burial service.

Yesterday, a subcommittee of the National Committee on Principle Planning Matters reportedly voted to recommend the National Committee approve the construction of Kasif, a new haredi city in Israel's Negev Desert near the Tel Arad Junction.

"…French Jews often talk about aliyah as a potential necessity, but never as something easy.…How could you not leave, when your child might not make it back from school, on a continent that knows the dangers of obscurantism all too well? At the same time, how could you leave, when these are the streets where you learned to walk, this is the language in which you say “I love you,” this is the first image your brain shows you when someone talks about home? On a very basic human level, when conditions threaten to pull you out of your home by the collar, how could you not hold on to the doorknob?"

"The fact that they're selling [Hillcrest School] to the same people, that they sold it in an emergency meeting and the fact that enrollment is increasing — I think that these three facts alone should require that [the sale] be annulled."

A. Romi Cohn, an Orthodox Jew who is the head of the American Board of Ritual Circumcision and estimates he has conducted about 25,000 circumcisions in his lifetime, said he had never used the consent form. He added that he did not believe the roughly 80 other mohelim affiliated with the association had either.

The scandal-plagued haredi-controlled East Ramapo School Board sold the Hillcrest School to a Skvere hasidic girls school at millions below market rate. The sale was voided after the appraiser was caught accepting a bribe from Skvere hasidim to low-ball the property's worth. After several years of appeals lost by the school board, the board sold the school again to the same group of Skvere hasidim, at the same low-ball price, prompting a new lawsuit against the board by residents. So tonight the board hired itself a $650 per hour attorney.

January 13, 2015

Although these communities were not studied, the study appears to show that hasidic communities whose schools teach only in Yiddish and whose public life in conducted only in Yiddish predispose hasidic children to have essentialist (and therefore fundamentalist) beliefs in the same way the minority of secular public schools which do not mandate learning a foreign language cause children to have their own sets of essentialists beliefs.

A new study has found that children who received expanded Medicaid benefits in the 1980s and 1990s contributed more to the U.S. tax system as adults. They also were more likely to attend college and less likely to die prematurely in adulthood.

Shalom Lamm's response to all the complaints against him and the development has been a constant. He has repeatedly accused critics of being anti-Semitic – even though some of the most prominent critics are non-Orthodox Jews - and claimed the demands made by village officials are unreasonable.

"Haredim are just as creative and imaginative, and as willing to succeed, as are secular Israelis – in fact, from what I have seen among those in the high-tech world, they are even more ambitious. The problem is that they don’t have role models to show them how to navigate the business world and get to the point where they can build their own businesses.”